rykemasters

Are they actually participating in the Bits & Mortar program? I would greatly enjoy not having to pay twice for PDF and print. Only one specific Imaginaire store seems to be listed, but I assume they share an online store. My local Imaginaire has sometimes carried RQ, but only a couple copies of one or two books at a time. Thanks for the help though, and @g33k as well. It's true the books aren't that hard to find here, at least not within a short delay of a few weeks, probably. It's mostly just that I got in the habit of ordering straight from Chaosium and I've come to expect getting the price of the PDF off the physical book. It's a bit of a luxury at the end of the day and I'll see what I do. I almost certainly will buy a physical copy of the books one way or another.

I didn't find anything remotely local. I found a place on the other end of the country with one (1) copy of the books, but shipping is even worse than getting it from Chaosium... The total price ends up being the same or even slightly higher. I'll keep looking but it seems like few participating stores in eastern Canada carry many Runequest products. I already bought the PDFs from Chaosium. I didn't really think of it in advance, but getting the PDFs along with the physical purchase is a different matter from getting the price of the PDF refunded off the physical purchase. The Bits & Mortar participating store doesn't take the Chaosium coupon code, obviously. If you send a proof of purchase from a participating store to Chaosium along with a valid coupon code, do they refund the value of the PDFs?

Is it possible to be notified when those books are available in Canadian warehouses? I'm itching to buy them but at present the shipping costs are nearly the cost of an entire extra book. Assuming that copies are expected to be available in Canada in the near future, I'm thinking my best option might be to buy in PDF for now and purchase the physical copies later. I could look for physical copies in nearby stores, but I don't think my chances are very good.

I believe they still do that. I'd have to look through my e-mails to confirm that I did receive the coupon for this specific PDF, which I don't have time for right now, but AFAIK you do still get that coupon when you purchase one of Chaosium's PDFs, and I'm sure I got the coupon for another PDF I purchased yesterday. It should be indicated clearly in their store.

I owned the first edition, and purchased this immediately knowing that it contains some scenarios that I really enjoyed and want to run (or run again) in the future. But I'm curious to know exactly what the changes are (aside from the additional art and maps, of course) compared to the first edition. It seems like it's just correcting a few mistakes, but is there a more detailed list of changes or additions?

I've found it depends on how much Luck is used by the character in the course of the game. It did make this character pretty much immune to Sanity effects in that campaign (which I didn't mind that much), but she was pretty lucky and didn't spend very many Luck points outside of using Resilient. Some other characters spent a whole lot of Luck just to stay alive and wouldn't have been able to use Resilient that much (if they had it in the first place). I would say in general, if your sessions are action-filled and have people using Luck regularly, they should be wary of spending it to negate every Sanity loss. House-ruling it to a max of 5 sanity erased at once would be a perfectly OK choice as well, I think.

So far, my players have survived many more encounters than expected. I'm usually pretty lenient about players escaping difficult encounters, although with consequences on their sanity. They've also almost always been lucky on their sanity rolls, so that over five different adventures, there have only been two actual bouts of madness. When someone gets badly hurt in the middle of an investigation, I usually let them recover slightly more HP than rules would dictate if they can get treatment (2-4 depending on the quality of care they have access to). I've had a character get hurt within 1HP of instant death, but they were in the process of escaping, one of the PCs was a doctor and my next adventure was planned to start in a hospital, so they made it out alive. I've had the opposite experience, where a lucky critical hit with a shotgun ended an encounter with a powerful witch very early. I could have fudged it for her to survive, but the damage was such overkill I was afraid they'd think she was unkillable, when the plan really was for her to be fought physically, although it should have been difficult. She was just a witch after all, and ostensibly not used to modern firearms. Either way, the fight wasn't the real crux of the scenario, although it was a climactic moment, so it was okay. Besides, exploding a witch's head with a shotgun actually was decently climactic for them.

I dunno, I think pretty much all three of those points cut both ways. And considering some of the discussions in this thread, it's actually not completely irrelevant!

I'm glad we can all agree on an average of one wang per slain foe, at least. Well, that would be per slain male foe, assuming no gender complications, so really, I suppose we can't agree on anything. Though, seeing as, unless I'm mistaken, that's a depiction of Babs herself, I don't think she's necessarily beholden to a reasonable number of... implements, or foes slain. Either way, I'm not sure fashion sense is a big reason for initiation into the cult.

That's also how I interpret that snippet, although two things should probably be considered: 1) There are various levels of initiation into the cult and we should probably not conflate initiates and Rune Lord-level folks, and 2) You could read that rule as referring to children born before initation into the cult (which would probably apply mostly to those who initiate pretty late into the cult, but for a cult like BG's where revenge is a major theme, that may be the case more frequently than average). But then you would expect a clarification that they can also not conceive.

Yeah, to be clear, I know that, as I've mentioned in a previous post. What I mean is, previous rulesets have included a requirement for celibacy, and the overall lore around Babeester Gore makes it pretty reasonable for someone to houserule things that way for their Glorantha. It's clear that there is no hard requirement for complete celibacy in core RQG or in the upcoming cults book, at least for initiates.

I agree this seems very lenient if this is a geas acquired during the game (getting a geas that prevents you from doing things you used to do regularly is literally the point), but I got the impression it was during character creation, which seems not quite as bad. Even in that case it seems fiddly to me compared to either letting the player pick a different weapon bonus, or rerolling the geas. I don't think the different steps of character creation happen chronologically to the character in the order you run through them, so it makes sense to let the player choose skills that are mostly consistent with their geas, although I wouldn't let a player completely run away with it. But I agree that effectively neutering the effect of the geas for that character is a strange solution.

I think the deal with the write-up in Storm Tribe is that it takes something very extreme, that sounds like the type of taboo that a hermit shaman, or maybe a secluded high priestess, would have, and applies it to a wider cult. If something like those restrictions were exceptional cases (then again, Babeester Gori are not a large cult and are thus somewhat exceptional... but not that much, seeing as every Earth Temple in several cultures is supposed to have at least one and ideally a few) that derive exceptional power from such stringent requirements, then that wouldn't really raise an eyebrow, but I guess many people just don't have that vision of the BG cult. The Storm Tribe writeup is playable, but playable as a cult even more ascetic and marginal than most people imagine BG cultists being, I suppose.

All of that makes sense: there's a difference between prohibition on marriage and a celibacy requirement, but they could be seen as two steps on the same "scale" of requiring initiates to forgo some worldly "entanglements", and celibacy would make plenty of sense for Babs, to be fair. I don't think her requirements would be as stringent as Humakt's, but a strong death rune and similar oaths probably make it difficult or even undesirable to maintain close relationships while carrying out one's obligations. I imagine Babeester Gori might still maintain significant kinship ties though, seeing as unlike Humakt severing all ties, Babeester Gor defends and avenges her mother the Earth (albeit Babeester worship obviously takes this way beyond the scale of literal blood kinship). I do think it opens up some interesting avenues that Babs doesn't require celibacy, since her entire thing doesn't rest as much as Humakt on cutting all ties and worldly passions (in fact, there's a very worldly passion in the kind of avenging rage associated with her, even though it's one probably incompatible with most pleasant human interaction), but that doesn't mean her initiates aren't usually celibate anyway for many reasons. I'm also not sure if we got word on Axe Maidens; I imagine those are celibate. Or at least ritually so, something like that.

My impression from various tidbits is that "just shacking up" is common and not in itself frowned upon as long as it's not taboo (incest, breaking an oath) or highly problematic for some other reason (inciting a feud, for example). However, never marrying, without some ritual reason, might be seen as immature (the old Orlanthi proverb "Sex is easy, marriage is hard") or inviting trouble (jealousy, cheating, heartbreak and so on). Specifically long-term unmarried relationships where people live together, I think I've seen some mention of that in Jonstown Compendium stuff (Dregs of Clearwine?). I don't think there's any real "canonical" info on that, but I don't think it would be a definite problem, it might simply be considered strange or mildly frowned upon. It might also cause some problem because, with no definite contract or oath involved at all, the official status of their relationship, property and offspring could easily become contentious (privately if not to the clan). That said, my impression is that if a cult restricts marriage, then it probably involves obligations that tend to get in the way of unmarried dalliances too. For "shacking up", I imagine that might be impossible or a serious problem if a cult member is required to live on temple lands (or even in a temple building) with other initiates, which may be the case in a cult like Babeester's. Then again, problems are part of why it's interesting. The drama!